Building appleseed on OS X

This page will guide you through the steps required to build appleseed on Mac OS X.

Installing Qt (4.8 or later)

Download the Qt development environment from qt-project.org/downloads and install it on your system.

Downloading and building the Boost C++ libraries (1.47.0 or later)

One option is to build Boost as static libraries. To do this, download the latest stable Boost package here (prefer .tar.gz archives as these preserve file permissions) and unpack it in the directory of your choice. Then open a terminal in that directory and type:

./bootstrap.sh
./b2 link=static

The other option is to use the shared libraries present in your system. To do this, when it will come to build appleseed, replace

cmake -DBOOST_ROOT=<absolute-path-to-boost> ../src

by

cmake -DUSE_STATIC_BOOST=OFF ../src

Downloading dependencies

Locate the latest release of the dependency package in https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed-deps/releases.
Download the sources:
Extract the 3rdparty directory (not its contents!) of the source archive into your appleseed source directory. It should look like that:

Building zlib

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/zlib/ and type:

./configure --static
make
mkdir -p ../../build/mac-gcc4/zlib/
cp libz.a ../../build/mac-gcc4/zlib/
make clean

Building libpng

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/libpng/ and type:

cp scripts/makefile.darwin makefile
make
mkdir -p ../../build/mac-gcc4/libpng/
cp libpng.a ../../build/mac-gcc4/libpng/

Don't do make clean at the end since this would delete pnglibconf.h which is required by png.h.

Building OpenEXR

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/openexr/ and type:

./configure --prefix=<appleseed-path>/3rdparty/openexr
make
make install
mkdir -p ../../build/mac-gcc4/openexr/
cp lib/* ../../build/mac-gcc4/openexr/
make clean

Note: gcc 4.2 and later will complain about -Wno-long-double not being a recognized option:

error: unrecognized command line option "-Wno-long-double"

To fix this problem, edit the configure file in 3rdparty/openexr/ and, on line 20744, replace

CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -Wno-long-double"

by

# CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -Wno-long-double"

and proceed with the instructions above (starting with configure).

Building HDF5

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/hdf5/ and type:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DHDF5_BUILD_HL_LIB=1 -DCMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=../../../build/mac-gcc4/hdf5 ..
make

Building Alembic

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/alembic/ and type:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DBOOST_ROOT=<absolute-path-to-boost> ..
make

Building Xerces-C++

Open a terminal in 3rdparty/xerces-c/ and type:

chmod +x config/install-sh
export XERCESCROOT=<appleseed-path>/3rdparty/xerces-c
./configure
make
mkdir -p ../../build/mac-gcc4/xerces-c/
cp 3rdparty/.libs/*.a ../../build/mac-gcc4/xerces-c/
make clean